Paid In Full
by Blood-Dipped-Wings
Summary: A soldier of the Coalition States finds himself in an unknown and unsettling situation.


**Paid In Full**

Void. Nothing but darkness filled his vision. There was an immense feeling of pain, but it seemed distant, yet personal, as though he were looking at himself writhing in agony. There was a flash. The entire space seemed filled with light one moment, then it faded to black just as quickly. He couldn't decipher what was occurring...there, it happened again! The lights began to pulse with a rhythmic sensation. He feared for his sanity, and hopelessly forced all of his focus onto the pattern, the intervals between the flashes lasting a quarter of a second, though each seemed an eternity of peril and fear.  
  
The flashes doubled, now a dual blast of light after every interval. The breakneck speed began to lessen and, ever so gradually, it became a more moderate tempo. Now the flashes were accompanied by muted drums. It sounded as though a bass drum were being hit with every flash, though not clearly, as if he were located within a lead box, and just outside of it the bass drum sounded.

The rhythm slowed more and more, until finally, it seemed almost ready to stop, and then...

"Aaaah!" Hanik screamed suddenly, his voice reverberating within his helmet as his vision returned. He blinked furiously, sweat beading down his brow. What had happened? His memory seemed to come back at the pace of a trickle, at first, and then steadily more until he seemed almost flooded with things he had already known, yet somehow forgotten. He wondered what the void was, or if it had even happened. Stars filled the outskirts of his vision, and he continued trying to readjust to see more clearly. It worked.  
  
Now that he could see, he remembered, and he was horrified.  
  
The battlefield was littered with the dead, both man and machine. His view was through the partially-cracked tinted glass of his Dead Boy helmet, his HUD giving him a slew of anecdotes and red warning signals. He couldn't see or read the strolling data. His focus was elsewhere. It was on the scene before him.  
  
He realized now that he was kneeling, his armored form in the exact center of a smoldering crater. The ground was pock-marked with them, and he seemed to be in the very core of their nest, the once green and fertile ground showing only patches of grass where once fields of flowers and small bushes would have flourished. War had changed that. An ominous skull of some great beast, obsidian black and shining dully in the mid-afternoon sun peered at him with fiery eyes, its horns melted and drooping as though they had been made of wax. He blinked again, and realized it had not been a beast, at least, not in the respect he had been thinking it. It had been a Brawler tank, but now was just a burning husk, its proud cannons turned to little more than scrap, and its crew hanging in bloody rags off the sides like gory tinsel for some gruesome holiday. Everywhere he looked the story was the same. Bodies of comrades lay mangled and life-less, their dark armor splattered with their own life fluids, now drying in the heat of the yellow sun. Once powerful SAMAS suits, terrors of the skies, now grounded in Terra's bosom, their wings clipped and pilots lying dead within. Hanik thought of seeing if one of the suits might contain an at least unconscious, but living pilot, someone who shared his plight, but he could see the face-plates of the suits were shattered, their tears a crimson red, telling him that to open them would garner the same effect as a still-born child, tumbling out dead into his hopeful arms. A prospect he found repulsive.

"Quite the mess isn't it?" asked a voice suddenly from his right, making him gasp in sudden shock.

He fell onto his back, turning his head to face this newcomer while crawling away. He saw a man wearing a white blazer with a casual red undershirt, and stark white pants with well-polished black shoes strolling towards Hanik's crater. His hair was bright and blonde, as though the sun was blocked by his head, and its photosphere was illuminating him like the halo of some celestial being. His skin was dark and smooth, almost bronze, with curved facial features to match. He seemed...well, not short, but not so tall he was intimidating.

"W-w-who are you?" Hanik stammered, his voice cracking with the strain.

"You know, it's almost depressing, seeing such marvelous works of engineering turned to so much scrap metal," the man said in a robust tenor, ignoring Hanik's question. He bent down a picked up a scrap of metal, holding it between his index finger and thumb. He inspected it for a moment, and then flung it away, proceeding to peer within the Brawler's red eyes, backlit by the fire still burning within. "Now look at this! It's like a boogey-man parents would talk about to get their kids to shut up and go to bed, don't you think?" He asked with a chuckle.

Hanik was baffled. Who was this man, why is he just waltzing around in a fine business suit, and a hundred more questions along the same lines. He swallowed the lump in his throat, and managed to say "I...I guess so."

"Well I'm glad you agree. Come on now, don't just lay there shaking. Get up, and come along! We've got things to discuss," the stranger said, waving his arm to beckon Hanik over as he began to walk away.

Hanik, confused to the point of absurdity, went against his better judgment and stood, his knees a little shaky, and followed the man deeper into the heart of the battlefield.

"What's your name, son?" the man asked.  
  
"Private Ulgin Hanik, part of the 33rd Chi-Town Rifles, Charlie company, Second platoon, und-" Hanik began, but was cut short by the stranger.

"Enough already! I asked for your name, not all that other miscellaneous crap! Common sense, son, use it. Now, if you're done prattling on about your serial number and manufacturing date already, I've got some things to discuss with you. First off, ditch the get-up, honestly. There's no need for the whole 'living dead' metaphor with all these bodies lying around, it's just too much, you know? Overkill and all that ja...ha! Overkill! Hahahaha! I didn't even think about that! Oh, man, puns are great, aren't they? At any rate-"  
  
It was Hanik's turn to cut him short, exploding into a fit of rage, his hands running down the sides of his helmet, screaming "What the hell are you talking about?! What's going on? We're strolling through the middle of a bloodbath here, and you're talking about what I'm wearing! Some of my friends could be injured out here, bleeding to death, and while I could be searching for them to help them, you're rambling about absolute nonsense! I swear, I-I-just...just...Gah!"

He reached for his sidearm and pulled it out, aiming it straight at this newcomer, who merely stared at him with a look of mild curiosity. His hands shook violently, bloodshot eyes staring out of his helmet straight into the calm pools of emerald green within the stranger's eyes. There was a long pause, and it seemed as if the silence of the war-zone thickened. Hanik's trigger-finger twitched.

The man smiled. "Well, go on."  
  
Hanik fired. The bolt passed right through his target. He gritted his teeth, firing again and again, the _hiss-crack _of distant impacts the only noise to be found as shot after shot sailed through the man without so much as a flinch from him. Eventually the e-clip ran dry, and ejected itself into the dirt below. Hanik continued pulling the trigger, his quaking becoming more violent, until his arms just dropped, the gun falling from his hands to the ground, his posture slumping slightly in failure.

"Honestly, you newly dead are so vibrant for being...well, dead," the man said.

Hanik stared at him wide-eyed, his heart sinking. "W-w-w-"

"Oh, you couldn't tell? You're dead, Ulgin Hanik! You are _deceased. _Your finite mortal existence has _ended_. Why do you think you woke up in a _crater, _for God's sakes?"

"But, if that's true, then why am I still here?"

"Don't they teach you anything in whatever passes for a school where you come from? Energy cannot be lost or gained, you imbecile, merely transferred from one state to the next. You are in the next...'phase' of existence, if you will."

"That still doesn't expla-"

"Why you're _here, _here? Well, you see, your life is a sort of...test. Those who do generally good and productive things, ascend to a higher plane of being, while those who are generally selfish and serve only themselves descend to a lower plane."  
  
"But I served my country well! The Coalition was my life, my _purpose! _I followed every order to the letter, I sacrificed everything for it! If this is a 'higher' plane, then-"

"This? A higher plane? Aha! That's rich! Hanik, you are an exception. Soldiers always are. Think about it. Sure, you 'served' the Coalition States well, but do you realize what you have done, what atrocities you have committed in that term of service? This" he waved his hands to point out the bloodshed around them, "pales by comparison to what you've done. Do I really have to list all the women and children you've butchered in your 'service'? No, Hanik, you are not on a higher plane, nor even on a lower one. You are in something far worse."  
  
Hanik felt his muscles tense and fear grip his bowels.

"Soldiers live for killing, and do just that until their time is up, slaughtering countless people, guilty or innocent. So, since you are so akin to pain and torture, this plane has been left especially for your type. It is that which you have strived for your whole life and sought to create: death and emptiness. This realm is void, save you, your despair and I, whose job it was to deliver this news. That and all the corpses that you have had a hand in creating or of those you knew in your life."

Hanik opened his mouth, trying to protest, but his voice had left him, it seemed, with every word the stranger speaking leaving the sky a bit grayer and Hanik's bones feeling a bit weaker.

"Well, I see you understand now. Guess that takes care of my job. Oh, and, before I go, have you ever heard of the saying: 'You reap what you sow'? To be honest, Hanik, you have sowed this all yourself, and the harvest is in, in all its plentiful beauty. Enjoy," the man finally said, his sly grin going from ear to ear, and with that, he was whisked away like so many grains of sand in a harsh wind.

Hanik stood there for a moment, the sun missing, the gray sky seeming to close in on him and choke the very air out of his lungs, leaving only dust in its place. He shambled forward, his legs wobbling, his eyelids feeling heavy and slow like rusty machine parts. His jaw dropped. His voice box managed to gather enough air for one final scream...an agonizing cry, one that echoed across Ulgin's Hanik's personal hell for the rest of eternity.


End file.
